Michael Kors’s Urban Resort S/S'23 Show

Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen breaks down the key takeaways from Michael Kors’s spring/summer 2023 collection, which fused city and holiday wardrobes together for the modern woman.

The collection was based on the “urban resort”

“The best clothes have no season,” Michael Kors declared in a preview ahead of his show. “You can change your shoes, change your stockings and it could be March or it could be something you wear in August – no one wants to have a separate wardrobe. They want to be able to wear their clothes all year.” It was part of the philosophy that underpinned a collection he titled Urban Resort: The crossroads where the city meets the beach, and traditional dress codes cease to exist.

It fused the city and holiday wardrobes

Set to acoustic covers of feel-good songs like “Bolero” and “Fernando”, the show blended the best of two worlds: The rigorous tailoring and coats of the authoritative office wardrobe, and the buoyant caftans, sarongs and pareos of the holiday suitcase. “You’re going to say, ‘But are there clothes for the office?’ Yes, there are!” Kors asserted. “I will tell you, in my office, we have women who wear caftans to work, flat sandals, casual things, but you’re also going to see a lot of tailoring in the show, and a lot of it is white.”

It recalled the “new normal”

If we seem to have forgotten most of the lessons from the pandemic, the wardrobe fusion was a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that we were all talking about changing up traditional dress codes. “We are seeing people getting dressed to return to work, because when they walk into the office they want to make an impression. So that’s an exciting thing. I think it’s wonderful to see people celebrating and trying to get back to some kind of normal, the new normal,” he said.

It was climate change appropriate

For all its vacay lightness, it was also a collection founded in real practicality for our changing surroundings. “The last six months I have been everywhere from France to Italy, to the UK, to California, to Chicago, to the South Pacific,” Kors said. “The weather is crazy everywhere in the world and the rules are changing. What we thought were [clothes] for a resort or for a vacation have become something that we now wear in the city. And when we go to Saint-Tropez, Mallorca, or Capri, people are dressed up! The city has become more resort and the resort has become more city.”

The street was Kors’s runway

Because the collection was rooted in the real-life wardrobe, Kors constructed his palm-lined runway in a 10th Avenue space that wasn’t just visible from the street through a massive floor-to-ceiling window, but extended into the street itself, allowing a group of students from his old school, the Fashion Institute of Technology, to catch a glimpse of the likes of Bella Hadid, Adut Akech, Carmen Kass, Alton Mason and Paloma Elsesser as they made their final walks.